‘Power & Class in a changing South Africa and World’ - speaks directly to the specific challenges as well as opportunities that presently face workers and the poor as well as those in progressive civil society organisations, both individually and collectively.

These challenges and opportunities are not just about our understandings, our approaches to and our struggles around for example, the power of the state and capitalist corporations and/or the changed structure of the working and ruling classes. They are also about the same in relation to ourselves; as individual workers and activists and as organisations, movements and struggles.

While the systemic oppression and exploitation of capitalism - both internationally and domestically - continues to provide the dominant frame for our individual and collective realities and responses, the cumulative impact also goes to the heart of who we are and what we are fighting for, not just against. If we do not confront and address this then we and our politics are in grave danger of being encompassed and defined by those capitalist relations of power and class.

New challenges and opportunities demand new ways of asking, listening and doing. It is time for us to ask, engage and try to answer questions such as:

What kinds of principles/values are inherent in capitalist class and power relations, to what degree have we practically absorbed them and how has this impacted on our own relationships and struggles?

What kind of principles/values should inform an anti-capitalist struggle and movement led by the workers and poor and why have we found it so difficult to inculcate and practice these?

What can be done to change power relations in our individual-activist relationships, in the home, in the workplace, in the community, in our movements and in our struggles for equality, justice and real democracy?

Come join us for what hopefully will be an exciting, lively and productive few days that will see us engage such topics as: contemporary race politics and the national question; the state and statism; representative/participatory forms of democracy & organisation; patriarchy & gender oppression; nationalism & xenophobia; ethnicity & tribalism; and, social conservatism.